115 suspects detained in UK after police operation

More than a hundred suspected eastern European criminals have been arrested by British police, backed up by colleagues from Romania, Lithuania and Poland, following a week of checks on British motorways.

Some 250 cars, along with 115 arrests on suspicion of offences ranging from human trafficking and money laundering to fraud were yielded by Operation Trivium – the first operation of its type.

Traffic police in England and Wales targeted hundreds of the 30,000 foreign-registered cars belonging to people living in Britain that are known to travel daily on British roads.

“The officers who have travelled from Romania, Lithuania and Poland were able to carry out real-time checks to establish if the occupants were wanted by police in their home countries,” said police yesterday.

The scale of the success of the operation – involving just eight eastern European police, who were based in a Birmingham operation headquarters and with access to their police files – has delighted senior British officers.

In one case, officers stopped a driver who claimed that he was Lithuanian, though it became quickly apparent to a Lithuanian officer that he could not speak the language and was in fact Polish.